Bayard Rustin, a leader of the civil rights movement, mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. and chief organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, struggled much of his life against
racism and homophobia.
Openly gay, he remained in the background for the sake of the movement, only to be sacrificed by its leaders as a
political liability. Nevertheless, Rustin made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement and emerged as a gay rights activist.
Here is a copy of a 2003 article I wrote on Rustin. It was tied to the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington.
By Phillip Zonkel
BAYARD RUSTIN had a dream.
As a tireless and pioneering crusader for civil rights, social justice and economic equality, his life rested on the bedrock conviction that ordinary people could change the world.
Rustin also practiced what he preached – He helped create the civil rights movement, mentored Martin Luther King, Jr. on the practice of nonviolent protest and was the architect of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, which took place 40 years ago today.
However, Rustin was openly gay and deemed a political liability. Many advisers in the civil rights movement told him to sit at the back of the bus.
“Rustin hardly appears in all the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s,” says John D’Emilio, author of the book “Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.” “He’s a man without a home in history.”
Rustin has been lost in the shadows of history at least in part because he was a gay man in an era when the stigma attached to this was unrelieved.”
Adds Angela Bowen, assistant professor of women’s studies at Cal State Long Beach, “He was ostracized particularly by black leaders because they were homophobic. They said he would bring disgrace on them because he was gay.
“Bayard knew they were little minded, and he was ahead of his time,” she says.
Long before King, Jr. became a national figure, Rustin routinely put his life on the line as a crusader for racial justice.
Born in 1912 in West Chester, Penn., Rustin was raised by his grandparents and deeply influenced by his grandmother, a fierce advocate for social justice.
By the 1940s, Rustin was a committed missionary of Gandhian nonviolence. Rustin spent three years (1943-46) in a federal penitentiary as a conscientious objector to World War II (He was a Quaker).
A year later, Rustin organized the first “freedom ride” through the South. The riders were beaten, arrested and fined. Rustin served 22 days on a North Carolina chain gang.
In 1956, during the initial stages of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rustin met the 26-year-old King, Jr. Rustin schooled the young leader in the mechanics of running a nonviolent protest.
“Rustin’s greatest historical legacy is he did more than anyone to bring the Gandhian message of militant nonviolence to the United States and to the black freedom struggle,” D’Emilio says.
“Bayard was so much broader than everybody (in the civil rights movement),” Bowen says. “Martin Luther King came along at a time when they needed a person like King. He rose to the occasion and grew into it.
“But a person like Bayard Rustin, who already had all that width and breadth and overview and internationalism, was also smart enough to know that (because of homophobia) he wasn’t going to be the person who was ever going to be leading things,” Bowen says.
Rustin was a brilliant acolyte of A.J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), turning the philosophy that “peace is the way” into progressive social demonstrations against the violence of injustice, i.e. the “freedom rides.”
But in 1953, Rustin, 40, was arrested as a “suspected sexual pervert” in Pasadena. Rustin opponents immediately demanded his resignation, beginning a pattern that continued throughout his career. A few years later, in Montgomery, Ala., critics inside and outside the civil rights movement made an issue of his “personal problem,” and Rustin voluntarily left Montgomery.
In 1960, while leading the push for a strong civil rights plank at the Democratic Party convention, Rustin was attacked by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. as an “immoral element” in the civil rights movement. According to D’Emilio’s
book, Powell, Jr. phoned King and threatened to publicly charge that King and Rustin were lovers.
King withdrew his support for the protest and removed Rustin from his staff.
“Bayard was so incredibly talented,” says Nancy Kates, co-producer-director of the documentary “Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin.” “He would rise to the top of something, then somebody would take a pot shot at him because of him being gay or issues around his sexuality and that would force him to leave or they’d fire him.
“Then he’d (rise to the top) again. He was like the Energizer Bunny,” Kates says. “He refused to be vanquished by people because they didn’t approve of him.”
But in 1963, A. Philip Randolph, president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, tapped Rustin to organize the March on Washington.
Rustin and Randolph saw the event as far grander than ending the ruler for sitting at the back of the bus.
They envisioned is as a “catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind demands for a broad and fundamental program of economic justice.”
Rustin was attacked by segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond as a “homosexual, a draft-dodger and a member of the Communist Party,” but this time the civil rights leadership stood by Rustin.
After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Rustin advocated a shift in strategy from protest to electoral politics – precisely at the moment when a more militant generation was taking to the streets in protest. Rustin was
attacked as an “Uncle Tom” and viciously gay-baited by younger black nationalists.
He called black nationalism a “no-win policy.”
Rustin’s in-depth feelings and exact words on the topic, as well as his thoughts on the civil rights movement, Louis Farrakhan, civil disobedience and gay rights are highlighted in the new book “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin.”
“Rustin approached issues such as gay rights and racial equality from the point of view that all of us, regardless of our sexual orientation, race and so forth, belong to the human family,” says Devon Carbado, one of the co-editors. “We are united in common cause simply because we are people, and the degree to which we allow any group to be singled out for persecution or to be separated out from the rest of the population is a measure of how far we have fallen from this humanitarian ideal.”
Rustin’s lifelong political commitment was to uphold this ideal. He continued that fight on many fronts (women’s rights, affirmative action, refugees) until he died in 1987 at 75.
“Bayard Rustin’s social justice agenda was far reaching,” Carbado says. “He concerned himself not only with civil rights, in the most expansive sense of the term, gay rights, economics rights, racial and gender equality, but also with what we have now come to think of as international human rights. Rustin engaged in world-wide humanitarian efforts (in Africa, India and Southeast Asia) long before globalism and human rights became political buzz words.”
Rustin also never abandoned the conviction that economic democracy was an essential as political freedom and that economic inequality was the graveyard of democracy.
“He believed that race relations and economic justice were the two key tests for how well this country was doing,” D’Emilio says, “and that without racial justice and the fair distribution of economic resources American freedom and democracy would remain a dream rather than a living breathing reality.”